Adobe Systems, reckoned to be one of the best US employers to work for by business suck-up mag Fortune, is cutting 10 per cent of its staff.
The company said Tuesday that it's eliminating 680 of its just-over 7,000-strong workforce as part of a restructuring, which will cost between $65.0 and $71.0 million. Employee severance …

Length of service and benefits

That doesn't seem high. First off, decent IT people or developers with experience (say, 10+ years) aren't cheap. Also, in addition to the salary savings, Adobe will be savings on the employer's share of the health benefits, social security and other payroll taxes, as well as any 401K or other retirement fund match.

@AuntyDan

Really...

So, gouging people for their software is not giving that great results, it seems. I mean, my girlfriend is a design student, and they have little choice but using Adobe software. It is good stuff apparently, but charging some $500 (student rate), if I remember right, for the upgrade to CS4 is ridiculous. But people have no choice, so they pay. When they can't pay any more due to having to eat and things like that, then...

2 execs

Oh great Adobe security fails harder

As if Flash and Reader weren't enough of a security nightmare I am sure cutting staff will make them even more secure going forward. Flash is such a fail technology. Refuse any technology that does not have at least one viable open source implementation. It tends to prevent debacles such as your box getting owned no matter which platform it is running.

Never quite got it

This company never quite the concept of software that wasn't bloatware, never got the concept of volume should reduce price and traded on past glories and inertia in the market. And I guess the management style and company ethos was also full of this "milk 'em" self aggrandising largesse. So I'll continue to use similar products offerings from other sources giving similar results at a fraction of the cost.

Big companies suck

So they can spare 1.8billion for the crap that is omniture, but need to save a few million by firing staff? Maybe if they stopped overcharging for their products people would buy them more and oh look! suddenly revenue is back up.

@Aunty Dan

Not high - Dell were offering 4 weeks pay for every year of service - however, I think the cap was 2 years. If the cap is 2 years, it's not hard to get $73k. Of course, if you work for a small company, these levels of redundancy payment are hard to be believed.

Problem is, with these staff reductions and the resulting turmoil, they will never finish a 64 bit version of Flash let alone 64 bit versions of Photoshop Elements and Premier Elements - not only are they 32 bit but Adobe don't even support them running on 64 bit Vista.

Re: cost of severance

According to the local newspaper, part of the cost (probably most) is for severance but it also includes "expenses from consolidating leased facilities". So it's not all for employees.

A shame for the people since, while there's some anger in some of the comments above about Acrobat and cost, many of their products particularly Photoshop Lightroom are good.

I suspect though that they may have gotten larger than normal upgrade revenue to CS3 (x86 Mac support, several key new features in Photoshop at least) and then CS4 has less of a compelling set of features for people who just upgraded.